• Attempting to find the most useful documents

• Works better with expert searchers: hard when most search terms are between one and three words!

• Term Frequency/Inverse Document Frequency

  • the number of times a search word appears in the document, divided by the number of times it appears in the collection.

• Weighting - adjusting the relevance ranking of a document according to many criteria

  • Matching all words

    • adding relevance weight when all the search words are in a document.

  • Position

    • adding weight when the matched word(s) are at the beginning

  • Tag Checking

    adding weight when the matched word(s) are in title, header, meta keyword or description tags.

  • Link Tracking

    • adding weight when other pages link to that page (Google, etc.)

  • Click Tracking

    • adding weight when people click on result and stay for a while, subtracting it if they come right back (DirectHit).

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